Preliminary Task

For the preliminary task, myself and two other students were put together in a group and were instructed to create our own version of a short scene from any horror film of our choice. This was done in order to help us get familiar with the cameras, editing software and anything else that we may come into contact with whilst filming our final product (the three minute horror trailer).

My group and I got along well as we each had similar ideas as we all wanted to do a classic bathroom/toilet scene. After a little while of discussion, we came up with our narrative which involved a teenage girl in a sixth form/college environment who encounters a mysterious person in the bathroom. Time was very limited as we were only given 1 and a half hours to gather all our shots and edit what we had produced so we thought it most realistic to film it in school instead of finding a location elsewhere.

We decided to remake a clip from Cry Wolf and incorporate elements of Psycho (e.g. the drain and tap scenes). We also ended up changing the narrative slightly due to limited time and so that we could add some of our own ideas to make it more original and not an exact copy.

We faced a few challenges during the shooting process as we were using a public toilet, meaning that many other students had access and kept walking in and out – disrupting the footage. Because of this, we then decided that it would be necessary for one member of the group to stand outside and explain to the other peers what was going on and ask them if they could kindly wait for us to finish filming. This meant that we had to film very quickly as we felt it unfair to keep people waiting for long periods of time. 

We had previously discussed the shots and camera angles that we wanted to use and the challenges that would come with it e.g. the CCTV scene which required me to climb on top of one of the doors and balance whilst trying to keep a steady hand to film. Another challenge that we faced was trying to get the camera to focus as it was a manual DSLR. Getting the camera to focus was sometimes difficult as a few of the positions we had to get into to film made it almost impossible to check if the focus was on and change it if it was not. An example of this is a gain the CCTV footage scene as I was in a very unusual position as it was high angle shot looking down which in turn caused me to have to film scenes such as these multiple times.

When editing the footage, an effect that myself and the other members of my group wanted to incorporate was the surveillance camera effect. In order to do this we had to create a darkish green filter to lay on top of the video, download a time code from YouTube and superimpose it on top of the screen to make it look as realistic as possible.  After I had finished editing the footage, myself and my group felt something else could have been added in at the end to make it fit in more with horror genre as there were no real horror ‘icons’’ present except for one scream.

Because of this, we decided to film a drain/tap scene where fake blood can be seen dripping around it. We did initially decide to have fake blood coming out front the tap but we didn’t have the time or the resources to do so. At first, we used red paint for the blood in the sink but as soon as it came into contact with water it turned purple which made it look very unrealistic and so we decided to use fake blood provided by a teacher instead.